In 1998, the Mastercam distributor of Switzerland asked us to develop exactly what you have described: An Access based database for Mastercam files and other files like pictures, setup sheets, NC programs etc. Now, we have 2004 and have sold several hundred copies of the so called "Project Manager". We used your idea of having the hyperlinks stored in Access database. So the database is not growing more than 10-20 MB. And customer store gigabytes of files in their project directories without growing the Access database. Anyway, give a try. Miele in Germany is using the system on more than a dozen seats of Mastercam.

I am from CAMAIX and I am using Outlook to do support for my Mastercam customers. I have currently 5 GByte of data collected in Outlook. After 2 GBytes file size, the Outlook pst file gets instable and I have to split the data in smaller packets. So 2 years ago, we have implemented a direct link from Outlook to the Project Manager for Mastercam. Whenever I get an support email with attachment, I can click on a Project Manager icon in Outlook and the email with attached files are transfered to my harddisk and a new project is created under Project Manager. This helped me archiving over 1000 different projects under different customer names. This feature is not documented, if you are interested, I can provide info how to do that under [email protected]

The CAMAIX post creates native Mazatrol code which is much compacter than the ISO code and is more CNC operator friendly. There are several Mastercam users purchased the product for 2 axis lathe or for 2D milling. The post can be tested free for 30 days. Downlaod is possible under www.camaix.com

A company in Germany have 4 seats of Mastercam and they use Project Manager (see www.camaix.com) in combination with CimcoEdit of Cimco. The editor allows to send and receive files to controls and the Project Manager C-Hook allows to manage different revisions of file and storing them under customer name and project name. Over 100 companies in Germany are working with this product daily, maybe this could help you. You can try this for 30 days for free.

I am using the Project Manager every day since 2 years intensively (maybe because I am testing what the programmer is doing). It is true that the Project Manager is based on an Microsoft Access Database (mdb file). Also the printing and reporting capability is based on a second mdb file (prereport.mdb in the Mastercam main directory). This is Access 2000 format and can be changed easily for each company. A no-cost runtime license of Access is sufficient to run the reporting and printing feature.